Harry's Gang: National debt looms large over the future of the country

A friend asked me around election time if things were as good for me now as they were four years ago. My Republican friend was implying that our lives are actually pretty good, so why switch the parties in power? Aside from the obvious issues we are facing now, I have to answer honestly: While my life seems to be pretty good, there is a national debt that has climbed so rapidly over the past four years that my future, and my children’s future, is in jeopardy. So, yes, my life is pretty good now. But that bubble can burst at any time.

Economics is a tricky thing. While experts can make predictions about the economy, predicting economic growth is a lot like predicting the weather: There’s no guarantee even the experts are correct. So while I trust a TV meteorologist to give a weather forecast for tomorrow better than I trust my 7-year-old daughter Ellie getting it right and the weather person getting it wrong, is still possible.

I think the economy is even harder to predict. With the weather, we know it will be colder in the winter than it is in the summer and darker at Christmas and lighter on the Fourth of July. There’s no such reliability with economics.

Which is why we have such a crazy amount of national debt now. Politicians get elected by promising to keep taxes low and cut spending. Rarely will a politician have the courage to say “We’ll increase taxes” even when they know it’s inevitable that taxes need to go up. Sure, some politicians campaign on calling for an increase in the gas tax or, as Carlton County will be doing soon, asking for a sales tax increase to build a specific project, like a new jail. But they always tiptoe around the issue and are usually very specific about the need for that particular tax.

Imagine if we just let real economists be in charge of taxation. They are experts trained in the need for taxation as balanced against the needs of the government to perform its functions. This will never happen, because even economists can’t agree on any solid constants.

Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, before he retired from Congress, had been pushing his economic plan for years. He’s a pretty smart guy. His whole career was spent trying to pass a tax cut reform bill that he believed would stimulate the economy and pay for the tax cuts by increasing economic activity. His plan included taxing the wealthy but leaving the middle class alone, pointing out that many middle class Americans don’t pay any federal income tax at all, so it’s hard to give them a tax cut when they already pay nothing. Ryan was willing to see a short-term increase in the national debt because, he believed, such debt would be paid off with economic growth.

There’s an old saying in the world of engineering: In theory, the practice works. But in practice, the theory never works. The same is true in economics. I suppose people like Ryan truly thought the tax bill would work. And, maybe, if the tax bill were implemented exactly as Ryan wanted, it might have. But add in all the nuances, edits, and changes demanded by the other 534 members of Congress, and Ryan’s final bill was not as pure as he would have liked.

That’s my theory, at least. Because Ryan’s tax plan was passed by Congress and signed by the president. It had some tax relief for middle-class taxpayers, but that relief expires in a few years. (It was included to make the bill palatable to many members of Congress, who had to answer to their constituents.) But the tax cuts to rich people and corporations were permanent. So, while the economy looked pretty good for a couple years, the national debt skyrocketed 36 percent in the past four years. Now, the economy is lagging, and there’s no sign that the national debt will be reduced any time soon.

This, of course, is dangerous to our country. No one seems to care that the good times we are enjoying now will need to be paid for in future years. At a certain point, the national debt will become so huge we will never recover. And any leader who tries to tackle the national debt issue will be chastised by those who don’t see the big picture. What? Raise my taxes now? And decrease the services my government provides? I’m not voting for you.

Unless we act soon, our nation’s debt will be the final death knell of our democracy.

Pete Radosevich is the publisher of the Pine Knot News and an attorney in Esko who hosts the cable access talk show Harry’s Gang on CAT-7. His opinions are his own. Contact him at [email protected].